Month: June 2018

(credit: Aurich Lawson)

The Department of Justice announced Friday that Ross Ulbricht’s alleged right-hand man—Roger Thomas Clark, also known as "Variety Jones"—has been extradited to the United States after being in custody in Thailand for more than 2.5 years.

Federal prosecutors allege that the 54-year-old Canadian was paid "at least hundreds of thousands of dollars" to work for Ulbricht.

Over two years ago, Ulbricht was sentenced to life in prison for owning and operating the notorious Silk Road, a website and online marketplace for drugs or other illicit materials. The operation is now defunct.

Enlarge (credit: PA Images via Getty Images)

Several members of the Delta Sigma Phi fraternity at the University of Central Florida, along with that chapter at large, have been sued by a woman who says her former romantic partner published nude photos of her on Facebook without permission.

In the lawsuit, which was filed in federal court in Orlando on Wednesday, Kathryn Novak said that she had dated lead defendant Brandon Simpson between October 2017 and February 2018.

The two were in a long-distance relationship. Periodically, when Novak would visit Simpson, he would film their "private sexual activities."

Enlarge / Brad Parscale, Donald Trump's campaign digital director, arrives at Trump Tower, December 6, 2016. (credit: y Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Data Propria, a brand-new "data and behavioral science company" run by former staff at Cambridge Analytica, has been "quietly working" for the president’s 2020 re-election campaign, according to the Associated Press.

Two reporters from the news organization overheard Matt Oczkowski, the company’s president, tell someone in a public place that he and Brad Parscale, who is Donald Trump’s re-election campaign manager, were "doing the president’s work for 2020."

Neither Oczkowski nor Parscale immediately responded to Ars’ request for comment on Twitter. Oczkowski "denied a link to the Trump campaign, but acknowledged that his new firm has agreed to do 2018 campaign work for the Republican National Committee," according to the AP.

Enlarge (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

Things aren't looking great for the family sedan here in the US. The car-buying public has turned against the traditional three-box silhouette, preferring the crew-cab truck, SUV, and crossover instead. Sedan sales are down for most automakers, and Ford has even taken the drastic step of abandoning it altogether in the very near future. So the 2018 Honda Accord might have a tough road ahead of it when it comes to finding buyers. That's a real shame, as Honda's engineers have done a great job. In fact, I'm not sure any new car has surprised me quite as much this year.

Mindful of my reaction to the fully loaded Toyota Camry XSE I failed to gel with earlier this year, I asked Honda to send me whichever Accord had the lowest sticker price. (I was actually most interested in trying the Accord Hybrid, but that one hasn't made it to the press fleet yet.) So I booked a week with the 2018 Accord Sport. This was the 1.5L version, yours for $25,780, not including the delivery charge. And unlike your average press fleet ride, this one didn't fall out of the options tree and hit every branch on the way down. Every feature from the infotainment system to the adaptive cruise control was standard equipment.

Jonathan Gitlin

Enlarge / More than 200 medications list depression as a potential adverse effect. (credit: Getty | ullstein bild)

More than a third of Americans are estimated to be taking at least one prescription medication that carries the risk of depression, including suicidal symptoms, as a possible adverse effect—and they may have no idea—according to a study published this week in JAMA.

The study is an observational one, meaning it can only identify associations and not whether common drugs are causing depression or suicide in people. Still, the researchers found some worrying links between the use of common medications and the potential for depression. Most notably, the researchers found that those taking three or more medications with depression risks had a greater chance of self-reporting depressive symptoms on a nine-question survey. Their rate of self-reported depressive symptoms was 15.3 percent, about double the rate reported by those taking just one drug with a risk of depression and about triple the rate of those taking no medications with risk of depression.

This is particularly concerning, the researchers suggest, because patients may not make a connection between their depressive symptoms and the drugs they’re taking. Drugs with risks of depression are very common, they may not have clear warning labels, and some can even be purchased as over-the-counter medications. The most common of them are drugs such as hormonal birth control, beta-blockers (used for conditions such as high blood pressure, heart attacks, and migraines), and proton-pump inhibitors (used for acid reflux).

Enlarge (credit: Valentina Palladino)

Those who attempted to use Apple Maps this morning during their commutes were met with a frustrating situation—Apple's navigation app hasn't been working properly for much of the day. Problems appeared around 7am PT/10am ET, resulting in errors when users searched for route directions and for specific locations.

The message "Directions not available—route information is not available at this moment" appears when searching for directions, and searching for specific places like "Penn Station" or "JFK Airport" yields a "No results found" message.

The outages affect all forms of Apple Maps, including those on Apple Watches and in vehicles with CarPlay, for users across the US, Canada, and other countries. Those using an iPhone or iPad can choose to use another navigation app like Google Maps or Waze, but those who rely on CarPlay and other systems that don't offer an alternative mapping service will be out of luck.

Enlarge / "Did you feel that?" (credit: OIST)

There are enough seismometers around these days to detect and locate nearly all earthquakes on land, except the most minuscule ones. The seafloor is another story. It’s expensive and difficult to maintain seismometers at the bottom of the ocean, so our coverage is pretty sparse. Earthquakes smaller than a magnitude four won’t register in many places—and “many places” in the ocean means a large portion of the planet.

A group of researchers led by Giuseppe Marra of the UK’s National Physical Laboratory accidentally stumbled on an inexpensive way to fill in many of the gaps. They were working on advanced fiber optic links capable of connecting things like next-gen atomic clocks around Europe. At this level of sensitivity, any vibrations near the cable introduce noise in the signal, which is generally a nuisance to be overcome.

But while running an experiment on a UK cable in August 2016, they realized the noise in the line was coming from a magnitude 6.0 earthquake in Italy. As the seismic waves pass through the fiber, the resulting distortion slightly delays the signal, causing a measurable shift in the peaks and troughs of the oscillating light wave.